Prolonging the End
by Angela Kip
Summary: For Gordon Freeman, two decades passed in a matter of seconds, but it wasn't so easy for the rest of the Resistance. Growing up in hiding during a war may not make for an ideal childhood, but at least it means you'll have plenty of stories to tell someday.
1. Midflight (Age 4)

**A/N: Thank you Zoey Overbeck for betaing.**

* * *

Midflight (Age 4)

The first thing I can remember is the screaming. It wasn't so much screaming as a cracked, broken sound that seemed to last forever, but that's probably just because I was being shaken awake. The world swam into view, then sharpened as I blinked, trying to bring the situation into focus.

My mother, holding me close to her chest, running. She was holding me at an angle that made it difficult to see, but I lifted my head and looked at her, wide awake by now.

"What's – "

"Oh God!" she cut me off as she opened a door, then clutched me tighter. I stared at the floor, at the electricity-like substance jolting around the room. A man I didn't recognize was lying very still in a puddle of red, his eyes unfocused. I didn't entirely know what was going on, but I knew enough that my reaction was to scream and grab at my mother's shirt. She turned away with a motion that was halfway between caressing my hair and pressing my face into her shirt.

I could hear her voice shaking as she murmured to me, "Baby, baby, shh-hh-hh," and then we were moving again as she desperately searched for something. The little I could see now was boarded up, in flames, covered in blood.

Jordan Sagan, who lived with her daddy five doors down from us, propped up against the wall and bleeding from her eyes.

I screamed again and pulled back. Something gave as I did so, and that distracted me enough to keep me from toppling out of my mother's arms. I had grabbed onto the necklace she was wearing by accident and pulled it off. She glanced down and took it from me, snapping it around my own neck without hesitation.

"Alyx, whatever happens, I need you to be really, really brave right now."

"Mommy," I said, my voice rising in panic, "what do you mean? Where's Daddy? Why – "

She pressed a hand to my mouth, slowing now. "I need you to keep moving. Find somebody who can take you out of the building. Okay?"

"I want to come with you!" I pleaded. She stopped, throwing open the door to the bathroom. There was something awful in her eyes.

"Not this time, baby. You can't. I'm sorry." We locked eyes, and she added, "I'll meet up with you later. I promise."

"You _promise_?"

"I promise," she repeated, lifting me up to the air vent. "Now go! As fast as you can! _I love you_!"

I pulled off the grate and threw myself forward, crawling faster and faster. Every thought in my head had shut off; I was a robot. The further I went the more smoke there was, until finally I burst into the remains of a room. The smoke was thick and nearly blinding, but I was army crawling now, staying low like we had learned one day in preschool.

Then – the silhouette of a person, right there.

"Hey, mister!" I shouted.

He came towards me quickly, as if he had been looking for me, and reached out to grasp my shoulder.

Then nothing.

* * *

A splitting headache forced me back to consciousness several hours later. Lying in my father's arms, I opened my eyes slowly to the chaos. So much blood.

"Oh, thank God!" he breathed.

"Daddy." My voice was so hoarse I could barely raise it above a whisper.

"Thank God," he said again, and hugged me so tightly that it hurt my ribs. "Oh, baby, I thought…"

"Daddy…" I gripped the little box jewel still hanging around my neck. "Where did Mommy go? She said…"

I stopped when I heard him crying, soft sounds above me. Someone approached, grunting with the effort of holding everything he was carrying.

"Dr. Vance," he shouted, "we'd best get moving."

* * *

We escaped the city in an SUV, with people taking turns driving so we wouldn't have to stop. Black Mesa used to employ hundreds of people. Now we were small enough to fit in a van, with one or two more out there if we were lucky.

In the backseat, I was lying across my father's lap, my mind flipping back and forth from a blissful unconsciousness to being trapped with its own visions.

* * *

Dad says we were driving for nearly two days until we reached the coast because it was the only place that looked like we could really stop. I spent the entire time either sleeping or coughing up mucus, unaware of the bigger picture of the world coming and going.

I think the whole team was in shock. When we were finally able to stop, there was a lot of crying. A couple people stepped out of the van, shook their heads sadly, and curled up into a ball. There was one guy who almost fell out and then he just started screaming and screaming. It was so awful that I plugged my ears and started to shake, until there was a _thud_ and he fell to the ground. The one security guard who had come with us had knocked the screamer out.

"Why was he screaming like that, Daddy?" I asked.

He let out a sigh. "Baby, a lot of people died when Black Mesa exploded, and a lot of people got left behind in the building and died, and a lot of them got very sick from something the aliens brought with them when the portal opened. Radiation."

I knew what radiation was because it was the reason we weren't allowed to go into some of the work rooms. It was so dangerous that even the scientists there had to wear suits to keep them from getting sick. If you didn't have a suit on, they told us, you could die from walking in there.

"What about Mommy?" I asked him. "She said…"

He quieted me. "Baby," he said, "she didn't make it out. She's dead."

"Was it my fault?" I said. "Or was it that man's fault?"

His face hardened. "It was nobody's fault," he said, but he had an edge to his voice that scared me. Apparently not wanting to continue on that vein, he looked up and gave a barely perceptible nod to a man walking towards us. He was still wearing a security guard uniform, but with three open button-up shirts over it that made it hard to take him seriously.

"Didn't Doc Kleiner leave you his contact number?" the security guard asked. "If we could get ahold of him…"

I stopped listening. My eyes were locked on a point in the sky over my father's shoulder, watching a small blue and white disk rotating lazily. I squinted, trying to match it to something familiar and failing. It flickered once and winked out.

"All right," Dad said, bringing me back. "We can try, but I'm not sure we'll get through." His voice was tinged with sadness. I tugged on his vest.

"Daddy?"

"What is it, honey?"

"When Black Mesa exploded, do you think it blew up Aperture, too?"

He laughed, and for a moment it was okay. "Oh, Alyx," he said, "I sure hope it did."


	2. And Then Run (Age 4)

And Then Run (Age 4)

A week earlier, Uncle Kleiner had taken a plane to a place on the other side of the world for a business trip. He said it was called Ukraine and he got out his globe and showed me exactly where it was. Everybody had decided it would be a good idea to try and talk to him because he was most likely okay and there might not be so much radiation or so many aliens over there; like Dad said, we'd had our fair share of miracles already.

Anyway, it took a long time for them to get a cell phone working, but scientists can do anything, so we eventually got through to him. It had to be a short call because those spinny disks in the sky kept cutting out the signal, especially the bigger ones, but we got the information we needed:

He was okay. He was staying safe with some people who were helping him fight the aliens and there wasn't radiation over there. An SUV is not very good against radiation, so he thought we should head over there and he said the people he was with would be happy to help us. But how were we supposed to get all the way from the coast of the US to Ukraine? That was when the signal cut out.

Dr. Rosenberg was the first one to speak. "It's a foolish plan, don't you think? Anything could happen if we fly over there. For God's sake, we were _inside_ Black Mesa and we haven't gotten radiation poisoning. And anyway, what have we got to fly?"

"We passed an airport five, ten minutes ago," volunteered one of the other scientists whose name I didn't know. "The Vortigaunts or the leftover radiation will only get to us faster if we stay."

"That's not considering what they could do if we go!" And then it escalated to the point where everyone was almost shouting and the security guard shut them all up by saying that being loud was the fastest way to get the aliens to find us.

Then Dr. Rosenberg let out a long breath, and he said, "That's fine. Do what you like, but I'm staying here." He waited a minute, and when nobody spoke up to say they were coming with him, he turned and walked off in the direction of a destroyed town.

"What an idiot," I heard a voice behind me mutter. I wasn't sure about that, because now everybody agreed on what to do. We would get some sleep now so that in the morning we could fly from here to Ukraine without the possibility of being up against aliens in the dark, and when we got there we would figure out what to do next.

* * *

I was scared of falling asleep again, but we made it through the night just fine. Everybody got up very early and we drove back to the airport and Dr. Bennet got into one of the small airplanes so he could see if it was ready to be flown. He got out of the car, stepped up into the pilot's seat to check a few things

and that was when the bomb dropped.

* * *

I was sitting pressed against the wall of the airplane, barefoot and crying. When I raised a hand to wipe the tears off my face I could see that it was streaked with blood and dirt. How had I gotten here? I squinted out at the room. There was Dad, sitting in a chair, and there was the security guard from Black Mesa, and there were a whole bunch of people I had never seen before. Some of them were clutching guns. Most of them looked scared.

It took two attempts to get to my feet so I could squeeze myself onto Dad's chair with my legs folded under me. He wrapped an arm around me and pulled me closer.

"Sweetheart, I…"

But he didn't finish. We must have stayed in that position for a long time because at some point my legs went numb, but nobody was talking. There was just the sound of the airplane, whirring steadily below us.

* * *

Uncle Kleiner met us when we landed in Ukraine, just as it was starting to get dark. Dad had everyone else wait inside the airplane while he and I went out so that the two of them could figure out what to do next. He had to carry me out because I felt so strange that I didn't think my brain was working right anymore.

"Hello, Eli." Uncle Kleiner forced a smile, but I could see that he was worn out. "You two seem to have held up."

"On the outside, we have." Dad tapped the side of my head. "It's a lot different in here. Poor thing's completely shell-shocked."

"That's not surprising." There was something like pity in his voice. "Is Gordon with you?"

"Never was. The two of us and Barney are all we've got from Black Mesa. We're exhausted."

Disappointment flickered across his face, but he just nodded. "We've only got a bit further to go," he said, but I could tell it was miles.

I turned out to be right, because after we got everybody else out of the airplane we had to walk a little way until we reached a big fence. There was a woman with dark hair and an angry-looking face standing near it, and when she saw us she went into one of the apartments nearby and came out with about a dozen other people. Uncle Kleiner explained that we'd have to be fast getting into City 17 so that the Combine hopefully wouldn't notice. He used a lot of words I didn't know, but I was too tired to care.

It turned out to be a sort of system. They were sending us over first, the eight kids, our parents boosting us up so that we could crawl over the fence and the people from City 17 could catch us.

"See you on the other side, sweetheart."

Somehow my arms and legs worked, and the angry-looking lady I had seen earlier reached up for me. "This is the last one?" She had a thick accent I didn't recognize. Someone said yes, and that was the signal for everyone else to come over. Some of the City 17 people brought the families into their apartments, but the lady waited with me because Dad and Uncle Kleiner were trying to help everyone else get over first. When nobody else was left, they started up together, slowly because at Black Mesa we never climbed fences. I could see it was hard for Uncle Kleiner. Dad reached down to give him a hand, and then I saw it.

Two aliens with three enormous red tentacles each.

"No!" someone, it might have been me, screamed.

"_Izzy_!"

I shut my eyes on reflex and there was a horrible sound, a tearing sound, and when I forced them open there was blood and my father and Uncle Kleiner on the ground and blood and blood and –

"Daddy! _Daddy_!" And everyone was screaming, all of us who were still standing there, and somebody was firing a gun, and the aliens were bleeding and their guts were spilling out onto the ground and there was _so much blood_ and _my father_ –

"They are dead, now get those into the building!" the lady shouted to someone else, waving her hand at the other people still standing there. Then she turned and called back and forth in another language with someone else, but I was going crazy, thrashing out and trying to get down. Not this. Not my daddy. I knew that once Mommy stopped being dead, she would come out of Black Mesa and find us, but who was going to take care of me if Daddy wasn't there either?

The lady finished her conversation and abruptly shoved her thumb into my mouth. I bit down in surprise and it must have hurt, but she didn't show it because I had stopped screaming.

"Your father going to the doctor," she told me. "I take you inside until he is done."

All I could do was nod weakly as she removed her thumb. The urge to cry came on again and again as she was taking me away, but I was too dehydrated or too drained or some combination. I don't know how long it was before I heard another voice and looked up.

We were inside now, surrounded by threadbare couches and side tables. One had a TV set with an old man talking on it. I recognized him from Black Mesa.

"I know that guy," I said suddenly, pointing. "Daddy called him a 'motherfucker.'"

The woman stopped dead. Then she howled with laughter. "That is not something you should say," she told me finally. "Is very rude. Dr. Breen would not like it." I must have looked hesitant, because she gave me a wide smile. "You do not have to be afraid of me."

"You talk different," I said. She smiled again and told me that her name was Masha and she was from a place called Russia. It was far away, but not as far away as we had come from.

"Very soon I did want to go to university in America," she said, "but then Black Mesa, it…" She stopped, searching for the word.

"Blew up," I said.

"Yes." She sounded satisfied. "You would like food? I get you some."

I wasn't really hungry, but she put me down inside a tiny room and scrubbed a few potatoes. While her back was turned, a girl a few years older than me in a worn dress came in. Her hair was tied back in a short ponytail, and she kept looking around like she was trying to find something. She was so distracted that she bumped right into Masha, and leapt backwards almost immediately with a cry.

"You get away!" she shouted.

"You are okay," Masha said over her shoulder.

"No! I don't like her, Mister B!" She crouched down and put her hands on her head before repeating, "I don't like her!"

"No, _angel moy_, all is fine," Masha soothed. Then she stuck her head through the doorframe and called, "Steven! I need you in here!"

In a minute he came in. He was a big man with lots of tattoos all over his arms, something I knew Mommy thought looked silly. He hardly glanced at me before kneeling down next to the other girl and murmuring something to her. She relaxed almost right away.

"You all right?" he said to her.

"Thanks, Mister Bubbles," she said, and he picked her up. I could see that her legs, which were dangling over his arm, were dark purple and very swollen.

"You can handle _one_," the man said pointedly to Masha, looking at me. "Can't you?"

She took the potatoes out of the sink. "You are very rude." He gave a little grunt and turned to walk away. The girl's eyes caught mine; hers were bright, so bright it was as if they had light shining from them. She raised a hand to scratch her head and a clump of hair fell out.

She got an eerie smile on her face when our eyes met, and then she chanted, "And one little girl was not like the rest, Mister B. One day she'll come out and sing a song of sorry." Then they were gone, the door shutting behind them.

"What's wrong with her?" I said bluntly as Masha handed me the potatoes.

She pressed her lips together as she thought. "She is very sick. She gets a lot of – how do you call it? – chemicals in the head. So her brain does not work and very soon she dies."

"Can't the doctor fix it?" I asked.

She shook her head. "No. The doctor is busy already. Most people are sick now or soon." She was going to say more, but the man who had been outside poked his head in and said it was time for her shift. She nodded and looked at me.

"I must go watch now," she told me. "You would like to go up with the others? There are children to play with."

I didn't really know anyone there, but what if they were all like that girl? Dropping the potatoes, I clung to her leg, eyes wide. She looked at me a moment and sighed before picking them back up and giving them to me.

"All right," she said. "But you cannot sleep. If you sleep, you must go back inside."

"I can stay awake," I said.

"All right. You can stay with me." The man handed her a shotgun and she took it as she passed him. I followed close behind. "When we are done we go to bed. It is a long day."

She didn't need to tell me.

* * *

I stood watch with Masha for two hours, but it wasn't so bad because she had lots of questions for me and I could ask them back. I learned she was nineteen and had been studying English for just over a year. She had wanted to go to college in the US and become a doctor, but now all that was gone.

"But doctors are important," I said.

"That is true." She nodded. "Most people are very sick now. It is a very bad sickness."

I wanted to ask her if Dad would be all right, but I was too scared. I settled on, "When is my daddy coming back from the doctor?"

"Soon."

"When is soon?"

"I don't know." She caught sight of my expression. "Oh, Alyx! Do not worry. Your father is okay. He will not die."

I was going to ask her who would take care of me if he did, but then she froze and said, "Shh," and a man in a weird uniform walked by. When he was gone, she let out a deep breath.

"They come during the war," she said. "It is all so different now."

"Will you tell me about the war?" I asked, because I knew that was what had happened after the bomb and before the airplane.

"No." Her voice was flat. "Can only be good if you do not know more."

* * *

Masha took me back inside after her watch shift was over and everybody else was asleep. The man with lots of tattoos was lying on the floor with his arm around the purple-legged girl. Her hair was still falling out, but she wasn't as scary anymore because she was asleep.

I stayed in the armchair with two blankets around me and then Masha went out of the room. It was dark and I didn't know what to do because Dad wasn't there, so I wrapped myself in them really tight, so that my eyes were the only things showing, and then I cried a little until I fell asleep.

* * *

In the morning, the man who was either Steven or Mr. Bubbles woke me up by saying too loudly, "Kate says she can't walk."

"Oh, _govno_." It was Masha's voice. "You know I read about this. Nothing good comes next."

"She's not having a stroke, is she?"

"Umm, I don't understand."

"A problem with blood in the brain?"

"No. It is not that." Her voice was harsh and unforgiving. "She has too much chemicals in her little body. Soon her brain forgets how to breathe."

"Stop it!"

There was silence for a minute, and then, "I have told you already what you must do. Would you kindly?"

There was a sound like somebody crying, and then Kate said, "Don't be a slowpoke, Mister B. Angels don't wait for slowpokes."

"I know," he choked out. "I know, little sister. Let's go." And then he picked her up and carried her out of the room.

"Alyx?" Masha shook me gently. "Is time to get up."

I turned onto my side and asked, "What's going on?"

"Everything is okay." She helped me untangle myself from the blankets, and then there was a gunshot from outside that made me jerk involuntarily.

"What -?"

"Nothing bad," she said, and I shut my mouth hard so that all of the questions in it wouldn't be able to come out.

* * *

An hour later, I saw Uncle Kleiner first. He was coming down the street and I wanted to run out to see him but Masha told me that wasn't a good idea. So I stuck my head out the window and smiled really huge and that made him hurry. I almost ran smack into him when he opened the door.

"You certainly seem to be feeling better, my dear," he said with a smile. "I'm glad you're all right."

"Where's Daddy? Is he all better?" I asked anxiously.

"He'll be just a minute," Uncle Kleiner said, and it felt more like five hours but finally Dad came in with a woman wearing a doctor coat. The first thing he did was take a knee so he could give me a really big hug.

"Oh, baby, I missed you so much."

"I missed you too, Daddy." I looked up into his face. "Did the doctor make you better?"

"She sure did," he said cheerfully. "Take a look at this." He let go and I looked down at his leg, but where there was supposed to be a knee there wasn't any more leg. It was a big metal rod with a curve, like half a crowbar.

"Does it hurt?" I said.

"No. Not anymore." He touched my shoulder. "Are you all right, Alyx sweetheart?"

"Yeah," I said, cracking a smile. "I'm all right, Daddy." And then I leaned forward and hugged him again.

* * *

**A/N: Quick Russian translation for anyone interested:**

_**angel**_** _moy_ - my angel**

**_govno_ - shit**


	3. The Waiting Game (Ages 4-5)

**A/N: Sorry for the late update! Between school, final exams, and moving states, things have been kind of crazy for a few months. The outline for the rest of this fic currently stands at several thousand words, so hopefully that should help me finish chapters faster.**

* * *

The Waiting Game (Ages 4-5)

Dad told me that the doctor had said it was going to be probably a month before his leg was all better and he could walk around normally again. I whined and told him what a long time that was until he told me how long it _would_ have been if we weren't in "our current situation." He told me that the war meant he had to try extra hard to get better as fast as possible, but it would still take about a month.

Since Dad couldn't walk very much and I was supposed to stay with him, we spent most of the first two weeks in a little room that nobody else needed. Uncle Kleiner went to work on something in the apartments very soon after we arrived, but sometimes he would come in to check on Dad (he tried to remember to do it, and remembering is very hard for Uncle Kleiner) and he would see me sitting on the floor drawing a picture or stacking pieces of wood.

"Let me take Alyx upstairs, Eli," he'd say. "There are still two or three children she could play with while I finish up."

"And where are the rest of them who came over with us?" Dad would answer. "There's no way in hell she's going out of my sight unless she's with you." Sometimes I didn't like that because I was bored, but other times it made me feel safe.

At the end of every day, I'd take a Sharpie and make a little tally mark on one brick in the wall. Then I would count all the tally marks and get Dad's help figuring out how many days were left until a month was over. He would always warn me that it might be a little bit longer and I'd nod, mentally repeating the number of days we had said even as I did so.

Another thing I did was to tally the number of important days. I don't know why, but it made me feel better, sort of like a safety net against forgetting any more than I already had, and all the time I would look at the number of important days and silently go over what had happened that made each one important.

The first important tally was the third night. We'd been woken up by a little group of people stomping around in the hallway. They were all talking about the Overwatch and Civil Protection and other things I didn't understand, and there was one guy arguing with everyone else. Finally I heard a voice higher than the rest.

"Wait, wait, you must tell us where you going. Is not safe out there."

"We'll be back in two days, tops," someone said. "Nobody'll miss us."

"I do not think this is a good idea."

"Guys, c'mon, listen to her."

"What, you need a _woman_ to back you up? Let's throw 'em in the back room and have it over with."

There were some protests and a lot of shuffling and stomping, which made Dad raise his head and ask, "What on earth is going on out there?" I didn't have to answer him because half a minute later the door flew open and two people were thrown backwards, one landing on top of the other. The one on top was a man I didn't recognize and he muttered a quick "sorry" before getting up and scrambling after the people who were now leaving the apartment building.

Underneath him had been Masha, whose voice I'd recognized. She wore a disgusted expression and a shirt covered in dried blood. Now she got up slowly, brushing herself off, and glanced at us. "I am sorry. Did not know you are here." She saw me and leaned in closer to ask, "You are all right, Alyx?" to which I barely nodded.

"_What_ are they doing out there? I think there are clean shirts in the cabinets if you wanted one," Dad added with a look at Masha.

"Thank you, sir," she said with a smile, turning to said cabinets and beginning to search through them. "They say they are going to find help. I do not understand where." As she spoke, she was rapidly pulling out things, which seemed to be mostly towels and socks.

"In Black Mesa," I told her, "we always had extra lab coats in the cabinets for when people made messes."

"That's true, honey," Dad said, giving me a strange little squeeze around the middle, "but we don't have those things anymore."

"Where did they go?" I asked. "Did they blow up, too?"

"Unless the aliens got them, yes."

I gave him a sideways glance. "Why would the aliens want our coats?"

Dad started laughing, and Masha gave us a nervous glance. "What is 'aliens'?"

"The things in Black Mesa," I said. "With our coats."

Dad gave me a look. "Everything we're fighting against," he started to say, and then broke off with a pleasant smile. "You have an accent. Where are you from?"

She smiled. "I come from Russia. Alyx tells me you are from America. Ah!" With a satisfied look, she pulled out a dusty brown jacket and stripped off her shirt to put it on. It was very big on her, but she didn't seem to mind.

"I helped stand watch," I said proudly. "We stayed up really late."

"You did, huh?" Dad ruffled my hair, or tried to. I was so coated in dirt by this point that it didn't really work. "Thank you for the other day," he said to Masha.

She looked almost apprehensive. "It is fine. The others, they like me more when I am with the children. They are mad with me." Her eyes lowered, and when they settled on Dad's shirt she did a double take, pointing to it. "What is that?"

"This?" He looked confused, but undid another of his coat buttons and showed her what he was wearing underneath it. It wasn't anything unusual, just a picture of Black Mesa's logo with _DELIVERING THE FUTURE_ written under it, but her eyes grew wide and she nodded.

"Yes! There is a man who leaves, he wears a, a…" She made a motion as if putting on a jacket or vest but couldn't come up with the word. "It has this picture, too."

"Did he have black hair?" Dad didn't wait for an answer. "That doesn't sound like something Barney would do."

"It's nighttime now," I said. "You can't go anywhere when it's dark. It might be past _midnight_." With this realization, I felt oddly excited to be up so late.

"It is half twelve," Masha said, fiddling with a tag on her jacket. "They say they must go at night, but I do not understand why. Jonathan goes after them."

Dad started to get up, remembered, and leaned back into the chair. "With the state we're in right now," he said, "I think we've got no choice but to wait and see what happens."

* * *

We spent most of the next few days watching out the windows for Barney and the others while Dr. Breen's voice rattled on from the television. We found out from Masha that two people were taking each watch shift in case "something happened," whatever that meant.

On the seventh day after Dad's surgery was when we stopped watching. It didn't take a lot of convincing for me, since I didn't know any of the people except Barney (and I hadn't even known that he had a name until now). I think it made Dad sad, though, because that day he said to Uncle Kleiner that we were the only three from Black Mesa left now. Then he paused half a moment and added, "And Gordon. Four out of all those people, isn't that incredible?" But I could tell he didn't mean incredible in a good way.

Uncle Kleiner sounded distracted, as usual. "Why, yes. Wherever Gordon may be."

"He's all right, Izzy," Dad said, and he sounded so sure of himself that there weren't any more questions.

The next important day was the eleventh, when Civil Protection broke down the door.

We saw them coming before we heard them, so we only had a few minutes' notice. It was long enough for people to hide, or try to run, which they should have known wouldn't work. It was safer inside than out. I had been in the shower, fully clothed since there wasn't any washing machine and Dad was insisting it would be faster. In five seconds the water was off and I, still soaking wet, was huddled under him on a chair. There were smacks and clatters and so many awful noises, and then the door came right off its hinges.

Five pairs of footsteps marched neatly down the hall, giving each room a quick glance as they went by, and then I heard them on the stairs. Then a sixth, the one at the back of the line, who broke off and stared into our room. He was wearing a mask, so I couldn't see his face, but I could sure imagine it.

He had a thing like an electric stick in his hand and now he pointed it at me. In a voice that was almost like a machine, he demanded, "Why are you all wet?"

I couldn't get anything out. I was stuttering too much and my teeth were chattering with cold and fear. After several minutes a noise like a weird scoff came from the CP. "Ph.D. scientist, can't teach his kid to talk."

That made Dad find his voice enough to say, "_What_?"

The CP put his hands up and took off his mask, and by the time I could string two and two together and realize Barney was underneath it, he was almost doubled over laughing. "Oh my God," he wheezed, pointing in our general direction, "you should have seen the look on your face. That was amazing."

"Pick on somebody your own size," I said, remembering a line from a story, but that only made him laugh harder and so I grabbed two books and threw them at him and he made a grunting noise and straightened up.

"That's against protocol, you know. I could write you up."

"That's _enough_. Barney, what do you mean by this?" Dad didn't give him enough time to answer. "If we were still at Black Mesa, I'd make sure you went straight back on Red Shift."

Barney did a little wince. "Hey, I'm sorry, Doc Vance. We got hung up trying to work it out with Civil Protection. They're worse than Rosenberg was."

"Rosenberg was an admirable _scientist_," Dad said, putting a lot of emphasis on the last word, and Barney rolled his eyes a little. "And I think the first thing you ought to be doing is explaining yourself."

Barney smiled and looked over to me instead of answering the question. "So, why _are_ you all wet?"

"Because Daddy said I had to have a shower and wash my clothes. And there aren't washing machines anymore."

He gave a little laugh again, then made a motion for us to follow him so that we could sit down and listen to the whole story.

The story ended up being very long and full of words I didn't understand, and by the end some people were crying and some were whooping and some were scolding the people who weren't real CPs, and it was so loud and confusing that I curled myself into a ball on the floor and my brain stopped working again for a little while.

I must have fallen asleep because when I opened my eyes it was very dark and we were back in the room we had been for eleven – no, twelve days now. Uncle Kleiner was asleep on the couch and I didn't see Dad anywhere.

I felt extremely sick and so I got up and sat by the tally marks on the brick wall and just sat there for a long time counting them and remembering all the things that had happened. I don't know what happened that night because when I asked Dad about it in the morning, he told me he had never left the room.

* * *

The people who were not CPs went out rotating on shifts for a few days, and on the fifteenth day something important happened again. That was when they all went on a big exploration, and so on the night of the fourteenth day was when I finally heard a version of the story I could understand, fed to me through Barney with Dad simplifying things whenever the words got too difficult.

All those people had gone out to join Civil Protection because they were spies trying to get us out of City 17. They'd only wanted to be gone a few days, but Civil Protection held them up and didn't let them leave for a while. So far they hadn't been able to explore very far because it went outside the city limits, but one person had found a series of underground canals. There were also tons of abandoned buildings everywhere, and underneath one of them was a place so secure that Barney said it looked like an old bomb shelter. All the fake CPs were going to go and check it out some more and see if it was safe to smuggle some people out to live there.

There was a little bit of arguing, but one of the fake CPs asked if anyone had a better idea and they didn't, so that was that. Masha stayed in our room the whole time because it made her upset, so Dad asked her if she wanted to sleep on the couch there and she said yes. I woke up the next morning as the fake CPs were leaving, and through a drowsy haze I watched as Masha went to see them off, smile never faltering, and when they had all left she spat on the doorstep and bolted the door shut.

* * *

The next two weeks were pretty much the same: every few days a fake CP would swing by and tell us how things were going, but other than that, we were still focused on hanging on until they had everything sorted out. I stopped bringing it up to Masha, though, because it just made her sigh bitterly and recite some Russian saying. Dad would at least remind me a couple of times that it was going to be all right and that someday we would – That was where he'd stop.

On the seventeenth day, somebody in the apartment next to us set fire to it and then the entire building marched out and tried to overtake some Combine officers. Dad didn't see me watching, but I was. There were a lot of people there and not as many Combine, but the Combine had their sticks and they were beating them down on people with awful cracks that sounded like bones breaking. By the end of it, they were all taken away by the Combine, but I looked very carefully and all of them were still alive. The Combine didn't kill anybody, they just hurt them.

That was when I stopped marking important days.

Barney came back on the nineteenth day and said to Uncle Kleiner that he thought the old bomb shelter place would be good for "whatever experiments you're doing down there." Uncle Kleiner said he had missed working in a lab and so he told us about an hour before he left again with Barney. I missed him, but it wasn't as bad because now I had Dad and Masha around.

Dad promised me that we would go see Uncle Kleiner again as soon as we could, and on the twenty-first day he was able to climb stairs again. I had been helping him practice this for lots of days, but this time he made me stand at the top and wait for him. It took a long time and I thought he might fall, but he didn't and when he got to the top he clasped my shoulders and even though he was out of breath, he managed to ask what had happened to his little girl's smiles.

* * *

I didn't like Barney very much because the way he did things didn't make any sense. For example, he disappeared with Uncle Kleiner on the nineteenth day and we didn't see him until he banged on the door very early on the thirty-second day, stuck his head in, and asked, "We ready to move out, Doc Vance?"

The fake CPs had figured out most of what was going to happen, so it took Barney and Dad only about an hour to nail down the details. They wanted to move as many people as they could fit to the bomb shelter and then spend the night and most of the next day getting us to the place where the abandoned canals led, which had turned out to be an old warehouse, still with tons of boxes inside (Barney admitted they hadn't actually been able to look inside the boxes, but they seemed to agree it was a good sign).

Most of the hour was taken up with them arguing about how many people could be brought. Barney said that twenty-five would be pushing it, but Dad said we had to take a lot more than that, like more than fifty. In Black Mesa Dad probably would have won because he was the one with letters after his name, but I guess that was different now. They ended up compromising on forty.

There were a lot of other things to compromise on, too. We couldn't leave right away like we thought because it takes a while to get forty people ready to leave, and we couldn't bring suitcases full of things because Barney said it would look suspicious if Civil Protection was transferring that many people at once. The good part was that most of the fake CPs came back that day and a bunch of them got really happy to hear about bringing more people, because their families were in the apartment building with us.

Another good thing was that when I told Masha we were leaving, she took me into the kitchen and pulled out as many packaged foods as she could and we figured out how many could fit into some really baggy clothes with lots of pockets that fit me.

"The new place is a warehouse," I reminded her. "There's probably lots of food there."

"I want you being fed," she said firmly. "Your mother does this, yes?"

"She did, before she got stuck in Black Mesa and couldn't get out."

"I know it is hard." She touched my cheek. "You are very brave girl. I miss you when you are not here."

"You aren't coming with us?"

She looked pained, but shook her head. "Other people, they need it more."

"Masha," I pleaded.

She didn't say another word until we got back in to Dad. I showed him all the things I could carry without looking suspicious and he told Masha what a good idea it was.

"She says she isn't coming _with_ us to the warehouse," I said, giving him an earnest look.

"She isn't? You don't want to come?" he asked her.

"Other people, they need it more," she repeated.

"But you don't want to come?"

She looked down and picked at a loose thread on her sleeve. "You want me to come with?" was the noncommittal response.

He gave me a squeeze. "It would be good for Alyx," he said.

And Masha smiled.

* * *

On the afternoon of the thirty-fifth day, we marched out of the apartment building in a single-file line led by Barney, the rest of us with our hands on our heads and eyes up at the sky. We were prisoners of war now, and it was on full display.

Walking like that gives you a lot of opportunity to think. It was about ten minutes into the walk when I realized that June fifteenth had been my birthday, and two minutes later I realized that it didn't matter.


End file.
